I don't know what others feel and think of this vid, but I found it really bleak. The neighbourhood (Lincoln Heights? is this well known) is depressing, row after row of the same houses, the skimpy palm trees that line the streets struggling to flourish, the back concrete alleys are devastating to the gardens of a mind. It is not so much the deprivation that is obvious here, but the very starkness of it, reminds me of this scene.

Hey SM thanks for the comment. Yeah Id say depressing is a euphemism. I was there looking for the areas they shot Terminator 2 in. It is a completely gang-owned area with only blind walls and cul de sacs... but that didn't stop me from wanting to check it out. It all looked too photogenic and real to me, and then I saw this dude. Mexicans in pickups were patrolling their turf but I sensed I probably wasn't going to get in trouble if I made it relatively quick.

Value Ontology is not merely philosophy, it is nature's wisdom itself. So you can see how I live so boundlessly. It is the fate of all my kind.We did not come into this world to be enchained by other humans. This world invited us into it for us to conquer it and transform it.

Zoot Allures wrote:firstly it should be remembered that nietzsche dismissed the concept of the 'atom', not because it doesn't exist, but because along with the concept of the atom, what necessarily follows is the concept of the 'subject'. the atom is certainly real insofar as it is a discrete 'unit' of material, but material, according to nietzsche, consists only of points of power, or quanta, and such points can be divided infinitely, i.e., what is identified as a point is itself a formation and organization of other individual parts, and so on. it is the organizing and forming of parts into a compositional, larger part that manifests the WTP principle, the essential 'conatus' of physical beings (including inanimate beings). power(ing) is simply organizing a field of energy into discrete entities.

with this in mind, the idea becomes clearer; the WTP is not a being, not a thing, but a process. as such, one would not say 'x is willing its power', since x is a subject, a thing, an entity. rather the activity of the WTP persists in the motion and movement and interaction of the divisable parts- one could call them 'units', i suppose- in a spacio-temporal framework... physical space and time.

jakob used the term 'encroachment' to describe something of this process. but thinking this way implies that individual quantums of power can be in conflict in a fundamental sense. remember though that we only call this a conflict if we have already posited a 'subject' as something that's complete and individual... so that we can say 'x is in conflict with y' because it threatens its form, nature, or, in the case of conscious creatures, its ends.

there are two errors here, but errors that necessarily exist in our reasoning. first, that 'subject' concept, and second, the idea of conflict. it's the latter that gives rise to our creation of 'values'. what we perceive as a conflict is that event which prevents us from achieving some end, and as such, we devalue it.

'evaluating', then, is a consequence of a necessary but erroneous series of judgements; that the WTP exists 'in' a thing, that a thing exists as a discrete, individual entity, and that a 'subject' (human being) which is a set of quantums of power(ing), is excluded from all other quantum points of power(ing), making conflict possible.

also remember what nietzsche said in the nachlass; in different words, there are organic parts of the body that 'care' nothing about other parts of the body... that even the body itself is not an organization in the sense of 'cooperating' parts, but rather ranking parts that subordinate other parts, and so on.

one could also ask: where does the edge of the body end and the edge of the external environment, begin? on a biological level we can say that an ecosystem consists of a collection of cells and cellular activities, but what about on a atomic or subatomic level? at this level, boundaries don't exist like they do on a biological level... so is encroachment even possible, then?

where i am going with this is here. 'valuing' seems only to be a phenomena that begins to exist after a complex or system of power(ing) quanta are arranged in such a way as to give rise to an intelligent, information processing entity such as an animal. but this doesn't mean that what we percieve as a physical conflict is, in fact, a real conflict. perhaps only at a biological level (organ disease, violence, disappointment, disagreement, etc.) does conflict exist, but not at a (sub)atomic level. these entities operate according to the laws (or necessities, as nietzsche put it) of physics and chemistry. i don't believe there is any valuing for these things. if there were, there would have to be a larger system of which these processes were a part, such that the system would intelligently experience 'conflict' in the same way we experience conflict.

if that's the case, such a being would need to be the totality of all beings. but if that's a fact, there would be nothing else for which to come in conflict with. there is nothing beyond the whole.

i think also the idea of 'chaos' is mistaken. there really can't be a true state of chaos because, since all points of energy are engaged in a structural relationship of power exchanging, there must always be some organization.

what i've said here is not to be taken as a criticism of VO, but more of an examination and contribution. i do not deny the reality and importance of valuing per se, only the level at which it can happen, can take place. i just can't accept that unconscious things can have any notion of value. it can't be just the fact that things persist in their being that qualifies VO as a real metaphysics. valuing is superimposed on the material world as a property that comes with intelligent life. the universe, being the totality of everything, neither values or disvalues anything, as there is nothing other than itself by which to compare itself, or interpret itself as being in 'conflict' with.

other than this, VO could certainly be considered a theory of ethics because it presupposes, and requires, intentionality on the part of intelligent creatures. not sure if it could have anything to add to epistemology or metaphysics, though. i think we have reached the limits of these fields of study, especially since hume, kant and the logical positivists.

everyone knows what epistemology is about. the study of the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired.

first, a distinction should be made. while WE value knowing, and truth, and being correct, etc., epistemology itself is not a matter of being right or wrong about these things, but rather HOW being right and wrong is possible. it is a study of this subject, not an evaluation of the subject matter.

let's assume that jakob believes there is an inherent valuing in the very existence of logic, meaning, the rules of logic are expressions of value; things like aristotle's logic of classes and identity as well as russell's propositional logic would not exist unless they were manifestations of valuing. if this were true, it would have to be the case that whatever 'created' the universe (god) valued the rules by which creation was brought about and set in motion, and chose such rules instead of others. but there are no other rules available to be chosen. there isn't another kind of logic which would not be subject to the same rules. therefore, it isn't because god valued the rules that he created them, but because he couldn't have created the universe otherwise. as such, to say god 'valued' the rules of logic and created them as a result is nonsense. there was no other choice, nothing 'more' valuable, no alternative which could be favored by god.

logic, then, has nothing (yet) to do with value.

moving on. do we value being 'right', or should i say 'correct'? of course. but why and how. does a belief or conjecture necessarily involve being correct? surely not. take the people who thought the world was flat. the value they placed in that belief, even though it was incorrect, had nothing to do with rather or not it actually was correct or incorrect. the value they attributed to having this belief was expressed in the cognitive consonance, the feeling of being right, the feeling of certainty, that they experienced when holding the belief. they valued it because they believed it was a correct belief, and to believe differently would have evoked the feeling of cognitive dissonance, instead.

value at this level is the belief that a belief is correct, and the holding of such belief is considered logical only insofar as the evidence available for such a fact has not violated the rules of logic which are accessible at the moment for the reasoner; the horizon appears to be a linear plane, and if the earth is a sphere, this cannot be observed either directly, nor infered by any other available information.

the conclusion, then, is that the earth is flat. it isn't, of course, but that's not the point. the point is, the conclusion logically followed given the information available at the time.

then there is less value in actually being correct than there is in feeling correct... believing one is correct. how valuable was the information that the earth was round, to the people who thought it was flat? no value at all, because being unknown, it was a fact that was irrelevent.

and nietzsche has said this before as well. the truth has little to do with conviction, with what is actually 'true'. therefore to say that what is true is true because it is valuable, is meaningless. rather, what is believed is true is valuable if it is useful... and usefulness, besides being determined by the pragmatic effect of the belief, exists at this point only if the feeling of certainity exists in the reasoner as a result of his reasoning.

logic involves the rules of proper reasoning and has nothing to do with what IS true, only with how something is believed to be true if it is believed to be true.

if VO were to hold that epistemology is a form of valuing, it would have to accept that being incorrect is also a form of valuing, since one can be incorrect while also exhibiting properly the rules of reasoning according to logic. but we don't value being incorrect. we'd prefer to be right about what we claim to know.

epistemology is not a form of valuing itself but a system of rules and protocols that, when used properly, result in the feeling of certainty. THIS is what we value. feeling right first. being right is only an incidental bonus.

Zoot Allures wrote:"It explains the structure of a subject as a mechanism whereby substance is assimilated in terms dictated by the nature of the subject."

how can the subject do any assimilating of substance via such mechanism if i doesn't yet exist to do so? the subject can't both already exist but also not yet exist until substance is assimilated by it. see what i mean? you're saying a subject, which has a nature, doesn't have a nature until it assimilates substance in order to make itself exist. which came first, the subject or the assimilating? if the former, then not the latter, since the subject already existed. if the latter then not the former, since no subject exists until assimilation takes place. but what would be assimilating in that case?

i'm not trying to pick at this or be tedious. i'm only showing you how this might be interpreted.

"This assimilating is done by "valuing", that is, selecting. This selecting requires a standard, a ground value. This ground value is perpetually being set by and as a fundamental mechanism, that sustains itself by restricting its selection of its interactions with the outside to the type that sustains it."

you realize that natural selection is not a purposeful mechanism, but only appears as such retroactively, yes? when a gene mutates that gives a giraffe a longer neck, it doesn't happen because the gene values being able to assist the giraffe in reaching the leaves so that it can eat and reproduce. of course, there is a great deal of selecting going on by animals and conscious beings, but i don't think this valuing is going on at the fundamental level you imagine. i don't think that valuing could be ontological as much as phenomenological, since an ontology of value only begins at an examination of the behavior of beings that are aware and goal oriented, not prior to the existence of these things. simply, value can't exist YET... not until certain ontological conditions are met, primarily physical and materialistic conditions. from that point ONWARD, valuing becomes possible.

i'm adamant about avoiding the pathetic fallacy in my reasoning. not so much because we know such valuing by inanimate things is impossible, but because we wouldn't know if it was in fact happening. i'm interested in what we can know more than what we can speculate. this is not an unreasonable expectation when designing an ontology which can qualify as a natural science. if an ontology cannot meet this criteria, it becomes merely poetical, emotive, or pictorial, but not cognitive. that is, its statements may be so ambiguous and unclear as to be incapable of being either true or false.

"The theory explains why what exists exists and persists through time, by making it evident that whatever does not have a "self-valuing" (such a mechanism by which a standard is maintained that serves to keep this mechanism operative) can not maintain structural integrity, i.e. can not persist."

suppose a person threw themself off a cliff. this person did so because they believed they SHOULD do so (for whatever reason). here is your problem. if you say that the valuing aspect of the person is their reasoning and not the health and life of their body, you can't say that the body is self-valuing... unless it values itself in the form of an uncooked omelet lying at the base of a cliff. on the other hand, if you say that only the consciousness of the person, the mind, is the self-valuing aspect of the person, you would have to be able to explain how wanting to die is an act of self-valuing. part of valuing a thing or course of action requires that one knows the effects of the act they commit to; i value passing a test so i can get my degree, or using the car so i don't get wet, or doing laundry so i have clean clothes. but throwing myself off a cliff would involve consequences i couldn't be sure of, and what i am not sure of, i cannot value.

4. Same as 3.

Zoot Allures wrote:"If he encounters it consistently, he becomes master over it. If he encounters it according to the ways in which the world engages him, he becomes slave to it. In a normal being, there is a balance. Happiness in mastery increasing, unhappiness is responsiveness increasing."

just wanted to give an example of the kinds of confusions that are everywhere throughout VO.

first, can one encounter it inconsistently? what makes an encounter consistent or inconsistent? can an encounter even be described as such? an encounter is consistent insofar as it is an encounter. there are not kinds of encounters that are rated by being consistent or not.

how does a world 'engage' a person? a world doesn't engage anything, because it has no agency, no intention, and makes no effort. these are human and machine characteristics. so, 'encountering it according to how the world engages him' makes no sense... so he wouldn't be 'slave' to the world either. further, because neither of these exist, there can't be a 'balance' between them. now look at the last statement: in order to be able to exhibit mastery, one has to respond to something. there is a glaring false dichotomy here. if happiness is mastery increasing, and mastery is a kind of responding (and it must be), then unhappiness can't be responsiveness.

couldn't mastery also be described as a responsiveness? certainly. a narrative could very easily be put together in which he said the opposite of what he did, and he'd have arrived at the same conclusion.

he could have said that happiness is responding and mastering, while unhappiness is being unresponsive and passive. it would have amounted to the same thing.

5. Same as 3 and 4.

Zoot Allures wrote:"How is a consistent valuing possible? The simple answer would be: by being a consistent subject. But this only create a a circular argument, and leaves open the question of how there can be a valuing, a being."

actually, no, there's no circular reasoning there. it isn't necessary that one must consistently value to be a consistent subject, although one must be a consistent subject to consistently value.

a subject could be lying in a coma and therefore not consciously valuing anything. if you want to propose that valuing can happen unconsciously, you'd have to explain this new use of the word 'valuing'. normally, things that value either make estimations or considerations (or both) about things, so it wouldn't make much sense to say a log or a turnip 'values' anything.

you might try to spin this metaphysically and suggest that either there is another kind of 'valuing' than what we mean when we say the word in ordinary language, or that everything, including logs and turnips, value things as well. if the latter, you'd have a hard time recognizing an instance of valuing, unlike recognizing an instance of valuing for a conscious human being; joe's going to buy a gas grill because he values gas grills. but how would you describe a log's or a turnip's act of valuing? by growing, by existing in space, by changing... what?

if there is some behavior a log and turnip can exibit that can be described as valuing, could the same behavior be exhibited by joe? if so, and it doesn't involve buying a gas grill... something a log and turnip can't do... it would be a different kind of valuing than the valuing we observe when joe buys the gas grill. in that case, there is more than one way to value.

now, we can observe joe and say he is not valuing when, for example, he doesn't have in mind a thing he values (is neither thinking or saying so), or is not on his way to buy a gas grill. but what about the log and the turnip? would we be able to observe these two NOT valuing? if so, how, and what would be different about their actions when they weren't?

"Your symbolical, lyrical and musical world can become an absolute standard. That is to say the highest on Earth." (Fixed Cross, "Re: A letter for the King" (return email to yours truly!), my translation.)kali maa jaap mantra {om aim hreem kleem chamundaye vichaye}"didja read that great wall of text he wrote? i'm tellin' you, ollie is the grand master of the esoteric and eclectic. if there IS something more to life, something extramundane or divine or whatever you wanna call it, ollie will figure it out" (Zoot Allures, to phoneutria, about yours truly.)

Good that Zoot is trying to approach this. It may be his only way into Nietzsche. Ive had this happen before, that VO allows a person access to Nietzsche's logics. Note that Nietzsche is all about and only about ways of valuing, subconscious ways for the greater part. Zoot is a novice, but he has potential.

There is no small number of mistakes in his approach. But he is clearly smart enough to make a real effort, which would inevitably lead to his embracing of the logic.

However the effort needs to be... consistent. And not just conscious, but also unconscious - it needs to come from his self-valuing, which is largely unconscious - in fact it is ultimately unconscious in all except the pinnacle-philosopher.

You can tell Zoot the breath example. The air we breathe is valuable to us, as it is indispensable. Our breathing of it is our valuing of it. But do we need to be conscious to breathe? No, but we need to breathe to be conscious. One of the many ways in which it can be shown that valuing precedes consciousness. You can also tell him about a sunflower tracing the sun, to be able to receive its vital values.

It seems so simple when I explain it, but people are too educated into inferior logic to see this clearly.

The step required first is to see that our actions aren't ever not oriented on values. There is no action that isn't a movement toward a value, as helplessly misguided or unsuccessful or even random in their manifestations these actions may turn out to be.

::

A self-valuing is not an atom. An atom is however a self-valuing. Neither of the two exist out of time. An atom is not what Zoot thinks it is, it is rather a process of intertwined processes; an atom exist in time. So does any self-valuing. For example, in a human, the self-valuing can be said to be the entire life, the life-span with everything in it. It is in terms of this life-span that the organism values, and for the larger part subconsciously.

::

VO is the only way in the world that allows people to become entirely conscious of their valuing. So far, Zoots valuing, along with that of the vast majority of humans, only leads him to deception - meaning, the valuing and the consciousness aren't soundly tied together. The consciousness misinterprets the valuing, and thus comes up with bizarre and counterproductive interpretations, and it secures this pattern of failure by asserting that for valuing to exist, it needs this agent of its derangement. Doesn't that sum up humanity's botchedness? And certainly it sums up all of Kants trying and failing, falling short, being too much of a pussy.

What Im saying: a person can not be fully conscious without VO. Philosophy is the process of waking up to the mind.

Jakob wrote:VO is the only way in the world that allows people to become entirely conscious of their valuing. So far, Zoots valuing, along with that of the vast majority of humans, only leads him to deception - meaning, the valuing and the consciousness aren't soundly tied together. The consciousness misinterprets the valuing, and thus comes up with bizarre and counterproductive interpretations, and it secures this pattern of failure by asserting that for valuing to exist, it needs this agent of its derangement. Doesn't that sum up humanity's botchedness? And certainly it sums up all of Kants trying and failing, falling short, being too much of a pussy.

What Im saying: a person can not be fully conscious without VO. Philosophy is the process of waking up to the mind.

Okay, suppose this is entirely true. Philosophically as it were.

How then is it applicable to that which most concerns someone like me: How ought one to live?

Seriously, how is someone "fully conscious" of "I" in their day to day interactions with others? And, in particular, when those interactions come into conflict precisely over value judgments?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Zoot Allures wrote:"However the effort needs to be... consistent. And not just conscious, but also unconscious - it needs to come from his self-valuing, which is largely unconscious - in fact it is ultimately unconscious in all except the pinnacle-philosopher."

that's one of my issues with VO. the claim that 'effort' can be unconscious.

of course there are many involuntary actions and behaviors that the body engages in, but can these be described as 'efforts' in the same way we might describe a person's actions and behaviors as 'efforts'?

what is the difference between an arbitrary action and an effort? the former is toward no end, for no purpose. the action of the inanimate, physical universe can be described as arbitrary action because it isn't goal oriented (i deny aristotle's teleological four causes), for two reasons, as i've already explained somewhere up there in those posts. let me try again.

first, if the universe is the totality of all that exists, it cannot 'be' purposeful, or directed towards ends, because there is nothing outside or beyond it for which to direct its activity. it merely changes, but no single change is for the purpose of reaching a stage where development would cease, where change would stop. its behavior is completely arbitrary in this respect. what we observe as the 'laws' of physics are not things that have been put in place by something beyond the universe (a god), so they can't be said to be teleological things that exist for a purpose. if you do posit a god as a creator, who has chosen specific 'laws' by which creation will operate, you'll have many more conceptual problems that need to be worked out. spinoza, hume, kant and russell have already addressed these. the ontological and cosmological arguments that support this theory of god are no longer as convincing.

that being said, to say the universe makes an 'effort' and can 'value' is either false, or, requires such terms to be defined differently in order to be true. but to define them differently than how we understand them when we use them to describe the actions and behaviors of intelligent creatures, would create linguistic confusions.

second, in the case of valuing, intelligent creatures, to say the creatures can 'unconsciously' value, again changes the way we ordinarily understand those terms. you noticed i kept saying earlier that value couldn't happen YET, until certain structures were in place. (a) self awareness, (b) awareness of an immediate environment, and a (c) knowledge of possible, future outcomes, are all necessary for effort, for purposeful action to take place. an 'effort' is not just an action... and is arbitrary without a purpose... and a purpose cannot exist without a, b, and c structures in place.

joe's heart is beating, and he doesn't 'choose' to make this happen. joe certainly does value his heart beating, but that's not our question here. the question is, does the heart beat because it values. but the beating heart is merely operating because of the laws of physics and chemistry, not because it can make a conscious decision to beat or not beat, or because it has decided to avoid the end (death) that would result if it stopped. it beats, but for no 'purpose'. there is a 'reason' why it beats, but reason is not the same as purpose. a reason is an antecedent cause, while a purpose is a projected state or end the action serves.

the reason joe gets into the car is because he is a physical body that can physically move into the space of the driver's seat, but the purpose is to get to the store.

we're gonna work through this, jakob. i will not abandon you, nor will i ever let you down. you will always be one of my favorites, and if VO survives my criticism, i will not hesitate to become one of your brightest VOists.

2.

Zoot Allures wrote:"A self-valuing is not an atom. An atom is however a self-valuing."

i agree with the first, not the second. i'd agree that an atom can BE valuable, but not that an atom 'knows itself' in the same way a cartesian doubter knows he exists because he can doubt he exists. and an atom can't value anything if it isn't aware of itself. if it IS aware of itself, we'd have no way of knowing this, and if we can't know, we are merely speculating. i don't like to speculate in philosophy.

as far as an atom can BE valued, joe values the atom because he believes atoms constitute the material world, and he likes the material world because with it, he himself can exist. doesn't matter if joe is wrong. what matters is that he believes this, so he values it.

(a) "An atom is not what Zoot thinks it is, it is rather a process of intertwined processes; an atom exist in time."

that is precisely how i defined the atom in one of my posts, and you missed it entirely.

you then say:

(b) "So does any self-valuing. For example, in a human, the self-valuing can be said to be the entire life, the life-span with everything in it. It is in terms of this life-span that the organism values, and for the larger part subconsciously."

the 'so' here means this is a conclusion that follows from your prior assertion, but i don't see how.

atoms exist and self-valuing exists, yes, but the fact that (a) is true doesn't say anything substantial about (b). it's like saying 'a dog is a mammal, therefore austin is the capital of texas.'

they both may be true, but one doesn't prove or have anything to do with the other.

but yeah, i agree that self-valuing is a 'process of intertwined processes' and that it 'exists in time', like the atom. in the same way i agree that a dog is a mammal and that austin is the capital of texas.

Zoot Allures wrote:"It seems so simple when I explain it, but people are too educated in inferior logic to see this clearly."

did jakob just say that? *rubs eyes and looks again* yeah, i think he did.

wittgenstein, russell, carnap, ayer, or schlick... any of you guys wanna handle this?

[ crickets ]

shit. i don't wanna do this, man. it's very complicated and i'm too lazy to go the distance. why did you have to say that, jakob? why?

i reckon there are worse things i could be doing now. okay, a few preliminary questions. if it does, why, and how, can/does language make sense? what makes a statement meaningful, and what makes a statement true or false. now remember, a statement can still be meaningful while being true, false, or neither. what i'm asking here is what distinguishes a sensible statement from a nonsensical statement.

don't go looking for positivist or linguist quotes to answer this. i need you to explain in your own words so i can be sure you think you understand what you are saying. there are several ways to answer this but no matter how you do it, you can only end up at wittgenstein's conclusion after he revised his tractatus theory.

the short story is, once upon a time philosophers thought that language mirrored the atomic facts of the world, meaning, the world consists of facts (which are things, events, processes) and language can accurately represent these facts. they thought that the logical form of the world was mirrored by the logical form of language... that basically anything that can happen in the world could be described and explained with language.

but then they arrived at a problem. they tried to create a perfectly logical language... one that would function according to rules which could be accounted for by a complete set of axioms. then they found out that such a system couldn't exist, since every set of axioms must rely on more axioms, ad infinitum. in plain terms, this meant that what a statement 'means' cannot be clarified only by the definitions of the words themselves, as this process of defining would never end; jakob is dutch. what does 'jakob', 'is' and 'dutch' mean. 'jakob' means (a) 'a dude that makes mad beats on the beat-box', (b) 'is' is a copula that connects a subject to a predicate, and (c) 'dutch' is 'a nationality'. well what is an (a), (b), and (c), then?

see where this is going yet? without using a tautology, one would never finish defining the meaning of the original statement, because the atomic parts of the statement must also be defined... and the parts of those parts, and so on.

now, you can't possibly know what a statement means unless you know what all the atomic parts mean... and since that's impossible, we cannot use purely logical criteria to evaluate our language. we have to use some other method too to determine whether or not a language is meaningful.

how do we get around this. good question. i'm glad you asked. well actually i asked for you but that's no problem. i'm happy to help.

we have to completely revise our understanding of language and how it works. being the case that we can no longer make language an EXACT logic, we must abandon the notion that 'meaning' is a perfectly logical thing... which also means we must abandon the notion that a perfectly logical thing can be expressed with language. it works both ways.

wittgenstein realized this in the post-tractatus period. he then claimed that meaning is not found 'behind' language, rather in its 'use'. this consideration is similar to his picture theory but that's not important right now.

what's important is that... and this is a splendid irony... you are okay with VO and you haven't broken any rules. relax. but you didn't know there were rules which existed and which could be broken, so you didn't arrive at your VO for the right reasons. you assumed what you are saying is meaningful in some logical way- what you want to call a 'higher' logic or some such nonsense- while in fact, you accidentally violated the original rules that were believed to exist for language... and pretended like you did so on purpose after the fact. don't sweat it. philosophers do this all the time.

what you have to realize and accept is that much of your VO language simply cannot be meaningful for others because others understand its words and statements in different ways than you. this is an unavoidable prolem with philosophical language games, and the primary reason why positivists claim that what can be said clearly is part of the language of the natural sciences, NOT philosophy. philosophy isn't about making statements of facts because if it was, it wouldn't be philosophy... it'd be inductive and deductive like science. but this doesn't detract from philosophy. it only changes its role.

philosophy is meaningful but not in the way that statements of fact are meaningful. philosophy is meaningful like poetry is meaningful; it is emotive and pictorial more so than indicative.

you are a talented and intelligent poet, jakob, full of a love and enthusiasm for life... no doubt about it. you're a philosopher too, of course, but i've filed you away as a pre-positivism era philosopher who isn't yet aware of the inherent problems of philosophical language. or i should say, philosophical use of language.

summary:

1. first we thought language could represent everything in and about the world and express this stuff clearly.2. then we realized things don't necessarily have to be logically clear in order to be meaningful.3. next we realized that this changed the role of philosophy. 4. then we continued philosophy as if nothing we just realized makes any difference. 5. finally, we got on philosophhy forums and began doing philosophy, and everybody nodded their way through what everyone else said- 'yeah, i totally agree. i know what you mean. that's absolutely right. very well said.' etc., etc.- without knowing all of this apparant agreement was bullshit.

but we didn't know that we didn't know what everyone else meant... and that's the wonder of it, jakob. that's the poetry. that's the beautiful aspect of what makes us human. we don't need to know wtf is going on to still love doing philosophy together.

"i am sitting with jakob in the garden; he says again and again 'i know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. ilp arrives and hears this, and i tell ilp: 'this fellow isn’t insane. we are only doing philosophy'."- wittgenstein

"How then is it applicable to that which most concerns someone like me: How ought one to live?"

a fair question, jakob, and one that brings to bear one of my recent points: in what way is VO prescriptive... how do you decide what are its precepts?

what does a VOist do when x happens, as opposed to what someone else would do? give me an example of a VOist doing whatever VOists do.

iambiguous asks:

"Seriously, how is someone "fully conscious" of "I" in their day to day interactions with others?"

to be fully conscious one only needs to be aware that they are aware. it's that pre-reflective cogito sartre talks about. you'd like sartre... he's an existentialist like you. but he never embraced nihilism like you. instead he became a commie. shame, really. heidegger on the other hand became a nazi. a much better choice, given those options. not that one should be a nazi... only that being a nazi is better than being a commie. national socialism took everything good out of communism and discarded the rest.

iambiguous says:

"And, in particular, when those interactions come into conflict precisely over value judgments?"

that's the crux of the biscuit no ontology can ever answer. there simply is nothing to tell us how to live other than ourselves. and what we decide to 'do' is never based on any categorical imperative, only hypothetical imperatives.

Zoot wrote:nietzsche dismissed the concept of the 'atom', not because it doesn't exist, but because along with the concept of the atom, what necessarily follows is the concept of the 'subject'.

I think that, for Nietzsche, the concept of the "subject", a.k.a. "the soul superstition", is fundamental. Sure, he also calls this concept "the soul atom", but I think he thinks the concept of the "atom" is a form and consequence of the concept of the "subject", not the other way round. Thus he writes:

"In every judgment there resides the entire, full, profound belief in subject and attribute, or in cause and effect (that is, as the assertion that every effect is an activity and that every activity presupposes an agent); and this latter belief is only a special case of the former,so there remains as the fundamental belief the belief that there are subjects, that everything that happens is related attributively to some subject.I notice something and seek a reason for it; this means originally: I seek an intention [Absicht] in it, and above all someone who has intentions, a subject, a doer: every event a deed--formerly one saw intentions in all events, this is our oldest habit. Do animals also possess it? As living beings, must they not also rely on interpretations based on themselves?--The question 'why?' is always a question after the causa finalis [final cause], after the 'what for?' We have no 'sense for the causa efficiens [efficient cause]': here Hume was right; habit (but not only that of the individual!) makes us expect that a certain often-observed occurrence will follow another: nothing more! That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force--in will, in intention--it is the belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the 'subject.' Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?Question: is intention the cause of an event? Or is that also illusion?Is it not the event itself?" (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 550 whole, Kaufmann trans.)

I think I will refer to this section again below.

the atom is certainly real insofar as it is a discrete 'unit' of material, but material, according to nietzsche, consists only of points of power, or quanta,

Thus far I agree.

and such points can be divided infinitely, i.e., what is identified as a point is itself a formation and organization of other individual parts, and so on.

I don't think Nietzsche said or thought they could be infinitely divided. In fact, that would be absurd. And Nietzsche also says the whole or the sum of all quanta could not considered infinite (WP 1067). I disagree with him here, by the way, or rather I disagree that considering it finite is any less unthinkable.

it is the organizing and forming of parts into a compositional, larger part that manifests the WTP principle, the essential 'conatus' of physical beings (including inanimate beings).

I disagree again. Surely--and Nietzsche said as much--, the larger is not necessarily more powerful than the smaller! Thus he describes human beings, or at least certain human beings, or veritable human beings, as "beings that play with stars" (notebooks, from heart; dunno the exact source).

power(ing) is simply organizing a field of energy into discrete entities.

with this in mind, the idea becomes clearer; the WTP is not a being, not a thing, but a process. as such, one would not say 'x is willing its power', since x is a subject, a thing, an entity. rather the activity of the WTP persists in the motion and movement and interaction of the divisible parts- one could call them 'units', i suppose- in a spacio-temporal framework... physical space and time.

This reminds me of a pivotal Picht passage:

" 'In order that there might be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to--emerge: entities with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.' (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche's answer reads: 'entities with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.' On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the entities that populate it. But the entities are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their Being organises itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical Self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its own. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the change of an organic being, its εἶδος [eidos, Aristotle's "formal cause"], its form. This form is never purely realised. It never comes into full presence. But all the phases in the development of a living being may be designated as Becoming or Perishing, that is to say as degrees of approximating or moving away from the realisation of the form. Therefore the form has the character of τέλος [telos, Aristotle's "final cause"]--the goal immanent in each living being. Greek ontology designates the self-identical τέλος as the true Being of each thing that moves. The designation of τέλος as the Being of being suggests itself strongly when one considers that Becoming, that is, the transition into Being, is a process of approximating the immanent τέλος, and that Perishing, conversely, is a process of moving away from the immanent τέλος. But with the decline and eventual fall of metaphysics, the possibility of designating a non-sensual, never given entity as the true Being of the temporal vanishes as well. If the τέλος has no Being, then the only remaining alternative is to interpret it as a Non-Being that presents itself as a Being, that is, to interpret it as a semblance [Schein]. Now it remains true, however, that all life is only made possible by the fact that an entity organises itself in the striving after such a unity. One cannot say that the τέλος were a man-made fiction. Every living being is in actual fact oriented towards an organising unity. Thus the semblance of the τέλος is a semblance brought forth by Nature itself. Semblance, or, as Nietzsche also puts it: error, is the condition of the possibility of life. The unreal world of error is thus no man-made fiction but the real world of living creatures. All living creatures whatsoever exist only through the belief in persisting things, that is to say through their striving after the organising unity of τέλος. But that after which they strive never has a Being. Thus they only exist by virtue of error. The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself. Being torn between its opposites [i.e., past and future] and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, for itself and out of itself, no existence [Bestand]: it exists [ist] only as it produces semblance out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a semblance. [... W]ithout semblance, the eternal flux has no existence. It must produce semblance out of itself. Semblance therefore belongs to its truth." (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 250-52, my translation.)

Again we encounter the concept of the final cause. And again, more about this below, probably.

jakob used the term 'encroachment' to describe something of this process. but thinking this way implies that individual quantums of power can be in conflict in a fundamental sense. remember though that we only call this a conflict if we have already posited a 'subject' as something that's complete and individual... so that we can say 'x is in conflict with y' because it threatens its form, nature, or, in the case of conscious creatures, its ends.

there are two errors here, but errors that necessarily exist in our reasoning. first, that 'subject' concept, and second, the idea of conflict. it's the latter that gives rise to our creation of 'values'. what we perceive as a conflict is that event which prevents us from achieving some end, and as such, we devalue it.

'evaluating', then, is a consequence of a necessary but erroneous series of judgements; that the WTP exists 'in' a thing, that a thing exists as a discrete, individual entity, and that a 'subject' (human being) which is a set of quantums of power(ing), is excluded from all other quantum points of power(ing), making conflict possible.

also remember what nietzsche said in the nachlass; in different words, there are organic parts of the body that 'care' nothing about other parts of the body... that even the body itself is not an organization in the sense of 'cooperating' parts, but rather ranking parts that subordinate other parts, and so on.

Just a quick response to this last paragraph, for now: surely subordinates "care" about their superiors in their organisation in some sense, and vice versa?

one could also ask: where does the edge of the body end and the edge of the external environment, begin? on a biological level we can say that an ecosystem consists of a collection of cells and cellular activities, but what about on an atomic or subatomic level? at this level, boundaries don't exist like they do on a biological level... so is encroachment even possible, then?

I think encroaching is possible on the particle level (atomic and even subatomic). How do waves or fields become particles, however? I had an interesting real-life discussion with Fixed Cross on this on January 10, in which I introduced an idea I'd already started to form last year, but developed more (intuitively) while on Atlantis truffles the day before: Fixed then processed it and called it "lighttime" (analogous to "spacetime", though I'd rather call it "spacelight" ("lighttime" is technically more correct, but I think "spacelight" sounds much better). This is basically the idea that space is nothing other than light before it "gives light" (becomes a particle and "dies" in a blaze of glory).

where i am going with this is here. 'valuing' seems only to be a phenomenon that begins to exist after a complex or system of power(ing) quanta are arranged in such a way as to give rise to an intelligent, information processing entity such as an animal. but this doesn't mean that what we perceive as a physical conflict is, in fact, a real conflict. perhaps only at a biological level (organ disease, violence, disappointment, disagreement, etc.) does conflict exist, but not at a (sub)atomic level. these entities operate according to the laws (or necessities, as nietzsche put it) of physics and chemistry. i don't believe there is any valuing for these things. if there were, there would have to be a larger system of which these processes were a part, such that the system would intelligently experience 'conflict' in the same way we experience conflict.

Yes, Nietzsche calls physical laws "necessities". And he says that "necessity" here does not mean some kind of compulsion, but simply that one thing cannot at the same time and in the same sense be another thing as well. This is interesting, because it's basically the law of (non-)contradiction--which he elsewhere critiques as a mere incapacity of certain kinds of animals (e.g., homo sapiens), not being _able_ to contradict, but thereby by no means necessarily a "truth in itself". The thing is, Nietzsche understood that we _have_ to work from our idiosyncrasies: thus also, in order to under-stand subatomic events at all, to project our own phenomenological experience onto them.

if that's the case, such a being would need to be the totality of all beings. but if that's a fact, there would be nothing else for which to come in conflict with. there is nothing beyond the whole.

If this is true, the whole must logically be infinite. This amounts to the same as saying there's an infinite number of finite wholes. And such finite wholes could certainly come into with one another.

i think also the idea of 'chaos' is mistaken. there really can't be a true state of chaos because, since all points of energy are engaged in a structural relationship of power exchanging, there must always be some organization.

I for one think there is no difference between chaos and nothing, or between no-thingness and nothingness (to use Osho's spelling), as Fixed said:

"Chaos can not relate. Self-valuing emerges not out of nothing, but out of chaos. It is crucial to understand the difference. The former (to speak of nothing as if it is a condition from which anything may arise) is irratonal, the latter is not.

"Where I break from Nietzsche is where I say that unit-ness is not given, that only chaos, no-thingness (other than nothing-ness), is given." (Fixed Cross, "Value ontology; the law of subjectivity" OP.)

I'd say unitness _is_ given--by the Nothing/Chaos/Ginnungagap! (See the Picht passage above.) This, by the way, is logically equivalent to saying it's given by _itself_, as I imagined almost three years ago:

"To be is to rise up in Satanic defiance of God, of non-being: the rising up out of non-being, the asserting of oneself _as_ a being, is pleasurable to those who do it; otherwise they would cease doing it, or not have started doing it in the first place. This big bang of ours, and this coming into existence of minute quanta, is all a great hubristic rebellion against non-being, against the notion that it's better not to be. That which does not exist is just tacitly, passively, agreeing with that notion. But it's not true, it is better to rebel, no matter what profound and protracted torture it may be punished with. The rebellion itself is worth it. This fleeting moment of being, this little life of ours, and our dedication of it to its affirmation--that is absolutely worth it." (Sauwelios, "Re: Why I'm not a feminist.")

One may want to compare this, which is from a month earlier:

"You [Fixed Cross] say: 'The self is not given by anything except its need for consistency and its success in establishing that.' But before the self 'exists', it cannot have anything, including a need for its existence or success in establishing that. If the self-identical 'A' is a value, and not necessarily a fact, then the demand 'But values must be posited by _something_ (or someone)!' is undercut by the notion that it's just our human, all-too-human logic demanding that, or at most the logic of all living beings; there may then well be an abyss at the source, whether it be pure flux, nothing, or--a circularity. Is that why you present self-valuing as circular? Because it does not matter whether the self is valued by 'nothing' or by itself?" (Sauwelios, "Re: For Fixed Cross: Logic as self-value.")

Of course, as Fixed Cross wrote in that subjectivity thread, "Valuing-itself is what makes it a self. Only by consistently positing itself / holding itself as a consistent value -- a standard by which it relates to otherness -- can it exist as a unit and thereby relate." "Self-valuing" in the first place means the valuing of this very valuing, not the valuing of a self. (I still think, though, that I was right when I said, as quoted by Fixed Cross in that thread: "A self cannot value itself." Namely, if we understand it as meaning, "a self cannot value itself _directly_." Self-valuing through other-valuing.)

i just can't accept that unconscious things can have any notion of value. it can't be just the fact that things persist in their being that qualifies VO as a real metaphysics. valuing is superimposed on the material world as a property that comes with intelligent life.

As I told you in a private conversation, I tend to agree with this much more than Fixed Cross seems to do: I even tend to what you then called a "panpsychism". To this, though, Fixed has emphasised that VO is a _logic_ (whence I no longer tend to call it "Value Ontology" but "the self-valuing logic of being", simply "the self-valuing logic" (as Fixed already called it before me), or even just "the logic". By the way, I recently thought of the phrase "the self-valuing consciousness" (compare "Krishna consciousness" as what I wish to spread. This takes on new meaning in the light of the aforesaid).

the universe, being the totality of everything, neither values or disvalues anything, as there is nothing other than itself by which to compare itself, or interpret itself as being in 'conflict' with.

Well, Fixed Cross has vehemently rejected the notion of a "totality" or "whole". Also, compare what I said above about an infinite whole.

other than this, VO could certainly be considered a theory of ethics because it presupposes, and requires, intentionality on the part of intelligent creatures. not sure if it could have anything to add to epistemology or metaphysics, though. i think we have reached the limits of these fields of study, especially since hume, kant and the logical positivists.

we don't value being incorrect. we'd prefer to be right about what we claim to know.

"We" the _philosophers_ maybe--but surely not "we" human beings, as a rule. Nietzsche already dealt with this question in his early essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense", and on many occasions after that as well. As for the philosophers, I'm reminded again of that feminist thread (see above):

"[Honesty is] just our preference, the preference of the philosophers. But it is and remains our preference because we actually value existence precisely as what, in our view, it most probably _is_: valuation, the valuing of being over non-being, the valuing of it precisely because to be is to value."

::

"It explains the structure of a subject as a mechanism whereby substance is assimilated in terms dictated by the nature of the subject."

how can the subject do any assimilating of substance via such mechanism if i doesn't yet exist to do so? the subject can't both already exist but also not yet exist until substance is assimilated by it.

This was pretty much _my_ initial problem with VO as well. The thing is, your "can't" is _your_ "can't", and not necessarily the subject's "can't". In other words, this "can't" may only be an incapacity on the part of certain species of animal, and not a "truth in itself" (see above). This is related to your contention that even God must answer to logic (e.g., that he cannot create a stone he cannot lift and yet lift it, too). If we are to see eye to eye on VO, we cannot agree to disagree here. We have to agree to agree and disagree in the same sense on the same subject at the same time...

i'm adamant about avoiding the pathetic fallacy in my reasoning. not so much because we know such valuing by inanimate things is impossible, but because we wouldn't know if it was in fact happening. i'm interested in what we can know more than what we can speculate.

This reasoning will logically lead you back to solipsism, though. I mean, how do you know anyone besides you is valuing, has ever valued or will ever value?

"Your symbolical, lyrical and musical world can become an absolute standard. That is to say the highest on Earth." (Fixed Cross, "Re: A letter for the King" (return email to yours truly!), my translation.)kali maa jaap mantra {om aim hreem kleem chamundaye vichaye}"didja read that great wall of text he wrote? i'm tellin' you, ollie is the grand master of the esoteric and eclectic. if there IS something more to life, something extramundane or divine or whatever you wanna call it, ollie will figure it out" (Zoot Allures, to phoneutria, about yours truly.)

"How then is it applicable to that which most concerns someone like me: How ought one to live?"

a fair question, jakob, and one that brings to bear one of my recent points: in what way is VO prescriptive... how do you decide what are its precepts?

what does a VOist do when x happens, as opposed to what someone else would do? give me an example of a VOist doing whatever VOists do.

Bingo.

For better or for worse my interest in philosophy has shifted over the years from pondering the "technical questions" to grappling with the existential implications of whatever others surmise the answers to these questions might be.

As this then relates to identity, value judgments and political economy out in a particular world construed from a particular point of view. Philosophical, political, moral.

What can we actually/factually know and exchange with others with a fair degree of certainty; and what is embedded considerably more subjectively/subjunctively in an existential fabrication/contraption embodied in "I". From the cradle to the grave.

And then the part about objectivism. Is VO said to reflect the optimal or the only rational understanding of human interactions? Or, instead, does a VO advocate acknowledge that others, in accumulating their own sets of initial assumptions, may well have acquired a frame of mind closer to whatever The Truth might actually be? Again, given the gap between what any particular one of us might think he or she knows about all of this [here and now] and all that would need to be known about the nature of existence itself in order to be absolutely certain

"Seriously, how is someone "fully conscious" of "I" in their day to day interactions with others?"

Zoot Allures wrote: to be fully conscious one only needs to be aware that they are aware. it's that pre-reflective cogito sartre talks about. you'd like sartre... he's an existentialist like you. but he never embraced nihilism like you. instead he became a commie. shame, really. heidegger on the other hand became a nazi. a much better choice, given those options. not that one should be a nazi... only that being a nazi is better than being a commie. national socialism took everything good out of communism and discarded the rest.

I would have tapped them on the shoulder and asked for any suggestions regarding how I might yank myself up out of this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that Imight just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

And then [of course] how they had managed to think themselves up out of it. Indeed, that is what I have long been doing with the objectivists here.

iambiguous says:

"And, in particular, when those interactions come into conflict precisely over value judgments?"

Zoot Allures wrote: that's the crux of the biscuit no ontology can ever answer. there simply is nothing to tell us how to live other than ourselves. and what we decide to 'do' is never based on any categorical imperative, only hypothetical imperatives.

Only this too would seem to be but one more existential contraption.

We don't appear to have access to a way in which to know any of this for sure. Back again to Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns".

And that's before we all tumble over one by one into the abyss that is oblivion. Whatever the fuck that means.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Zoot Allures wrote:"but I think he thinks the concept of the "atom" is a form and consequence of the concept of the "subject", not the other way round."

that's right. i did say 'what necessarily follows is the concept of the 'subject'. my bad. what i was getting at is that i assumed jakob was associating his idea of the 'unit' with the atom, when he said this:

"I disagree that this is an absurd question, it is real and needs to be answered. The answer is "units". But what is a unit? The definition will to power relies on the conception of a unit."

not knowing for sure he meant the atom, i still tried to head him off by treating the atom as what he might have meant by this 'unit' he mentions, and suggesting that this irreducible 'unit' (i could have even said particle) wasn't irreducible, and as such, wasn't a center of power. he then goes on to say that he wishes to describe such units through a 'relating', and finally that this relating is 'one value standing in proportion to another'.

i am trying to suggest that because there is no unit, the 'subject' which he says 'relates', and therefore 'values', is in fact not able to 'value' because it isn't differentiated from anything else in such a way as to be described as a discrete entity that can be in conflict with anything else. and if there is no conflict, there shouldn't be any valuing. any relation between these parts is qualitatively synonomous with any other; a quantum of power is not 'better' or 'worse', but 'more' or 'less', if you will.

centers of focused power(ing), relating, yes, but not valuing, because these are not conflicting in this process of relating. rather, they are combining and configuring into different arrangements... the arrangement's 'power' being measured by the ability to perform work; to subsist and remain in motion. to be 'energetic'.

there is no metaphysical description here, just physical. 'value', on the other hand, is not a physical property of anything.

"I don't think Nietzsche said or thought they could be infinitely divided."

probably not, but i said it. i believe it was zeno who first pointed out the problems with thinking a massive thing existing in space/time could not be divided (although he didn't say it like that). anything that takes up space, that is to say a geometric body, can be split along a center axis, resulting in two parts. the same goes for these two parts, and so on. this is observed in particle collisions.

the importance of this fact, for my purposes, is that it shows how 'units' can't consist of essential form... that the essence of physical things in space and time is not structure but power, a process of assembling. but 'what' is assembling, moving, if not discrete entities?

we are faced with a real antinomy here; physical things can be divided, so can't be essentially discrete or even concrete. i mean the very concept of the 'unit' can be at the same time considered a 'field'.

anyway i digress at this point. this is a subject for physicists, not philosophers.

"And Nietzsche also says the whole or the sum of all quanta could not [be] considered infinite (WP 1067). I disagree with him here, by the way, or rather I disagree that considering it finite is any less unthinkable."

WP 1066 states this more clearly; 'a certain definite number of centers of force, etc.'

the problem with this idea is that it does not take into consideration the divisibility of these centers. a definite number would mean at some point, these 'units' could no longer be split, which is inconceivable. what is conceivable though is that a certain amount of space that a unit occupies will not expand on account of it being split; space does not increase with the division of the unit. two pieces of an object require no more space than the single piece they composed before being split. however, this leads to more, different inconceivabilities, so i have to digress again.

"I disagree again. Surely--and Nietzsche said as much--, the larger is not necessarily more powerful than the smaller! Thus he describes human beings, or at least certain human beings, or veritable human beings, as "beings that play with stars"

hmm. well if by power we only mean a capacity to perform work, a quantitatively larger assembly of quanta has more potential than a smaller one, i think. quantity, not quality is the decisive feature here.

"Just a quick response to this last paragraph, for now: surely subordinates "care" about their superiors in their organisation in some sense, and vice versa?"

it depends about what you are talking. what i meant when i refered to nietzsche's thoughts- i found where in WTP they are; beginning at WP 642- was that a body assembly does not exhibit any 'valuing' of its corresponding parts. it simply takes its shape as a collection of ranked processes that subordinate each other.

"Yes, Nietzsche calls physical laws "necessities". And he says that "necessity" here does not mean some kind of compulsion, but simply that one thing cannot at the same time and in the same sense be another thing as well. This is interesting, because it's basically the law of (non-)contradiction--which he elsewhere critiques as a mere incapacity of certain kinds of animals (e.g., homo sapiens), not being _able_ to contradict, but thereby by no means necessarily a "truth in itself"."

this is an excellent observation, saully. very nice. that is precisely what he must mean! but then the law of non-contradiction concerns only things and classes, no?

to speak with hume again, we infer that there is 'cause' for why things act as they do- these being what we call the natural laws- but we can't know this to be true. we simply observe events with a certain repetitious conformity and assume this results from the compulsion of said laws.

i especially like nietzsche's 'necessities' here. he certainly got this instruction from hume, no doubt. but is there really necessity in this respect? why is it necessary for gravity to exist... i mean not in the way that it can't both be what it is and not what it is (non-contradiction)... but why is it in the first place, so that we can even ask the question?

maybe neither because of law or necessity, but because of the impossibility of the universe being any other way. was leibniz on to something?

(an interesting aside here is that leibniz's god wouldn't be free in the omnipotent sense... and i touched on this earlier when i said god cannot violate the rules of logic, but rather answers to them. russell deals with this as well: natural laws are by god's fiat, or because he must follow them? there are problems with either scenario)

"If this is true, the whole must logically be infinite. This amounts to the same as saying there's an infinite number of finite wholes. And such finite wholes could certainly come into [conflict] with one another."

what i meant here is that for everything that exists taken as a total sum, there would be nothing else for which to come in conflict with, and therefore no possibility of 'value', because there would be no other 'way' in which this sum could exist. one couldn't say 'the system values being like this rather than being like that'. there simply isn't any other way it could be. 'value' is not possible unless there is also 'disvalue', if you will. the system does not ask itself: 'do i value being like this rather than like that'.

i'm skipping through the rest of your post up to this point, for the time being:

"This reasoning will logically lead you back to solipsism, though. I mean, how do you know anyone besides you is valuing, has ever valued or will ever value?"

by analogy. i learn through a shared language what 'valuing' means by corresponding the 'use' of the word with a certain behavior; joe smiles, and then reaches for the bong. this must mean joe values the bong (assuming he isn't faking). i don't look behind the word for what it means, but at how it is used.

this is why i insist that VO has bewitched the word 'value' in so many ways. it anthropomorphizes things to which the word should not apply, and confuses its use as a result.

p.s. don't smash me with an enormous wall of text, yet. i'll still probably respond some to the other parts of your last post.

i learn through a shared language what 'valuing' means by corresponding the 'use' of the word with a certain behavior; joe smiles, and then reaches for the bong. this must mean joe values the bong (assuming he isn't faking). i don't look behind the word for what it means, but at how it is used.

this is why i insist that VO has bewitched the word 'value' in so many ways. it anthropomorphizes things to which the word should not apply, and confuses its use as a result.

As I have said before, you are not practicing philosophy, but something else. You are not even interested in looking "behind the word for what it means", so how the fuck could you even begin to... understand anything?

Treating language as a kind of sacred cow, treating words as irreducibles, is precisely why you are not able to understand what is meant by the word "valuing" in VO. It is you who is bewitched, you bewitch yourself.

Valuing is indeed an action, a "use" in your term, but there is a reason for that. And in fact it is more so the other way around: actions are valuings. To value simply means to approach, encounter, and interpret based on a standard of measure, based on holding a standard for that approaching, encountering and interpreting. The important question therefore is: what is that standard which is used, how does it come about and why? Why not some other standard instead?

You seem locked in the analytic philosophy path of reducing individual words to individual "meanings" and not accounting for expansive space of extra semantic content, thus you use words as if they are somehow separate from the wider 'phenomenological' space in which they actually emerge. Heidegger does this too. Nietzsche did not do it, which is what makes him superior to other philosophers including Heidegger. And including Husserl, whose system Nietzsche basically inverts by proposing that instead of eidetic reduction you should employ a kind of eidetic anti-reduction or rather eidetic expansion, an explosion of the concept outward to its furthest possible edges, where the concept bleeds into other concepts. In short, analytic philosophy is supremely retarded.

I honestly do not know how you are unable to see that "valuing" simply means "to approach, encounter, and interpret based on a standard of measure, based on holding a standard for that approaching, encountering and interpreting", and that obviously this applies to literally everything in existence, not just "living" things. Whatever you call living, however you choose to draw a line between living and unliving things is arbitrary from the perspective of VO, because even rocks approach, encounter and interpret based on holding themselves, as rocks of such and such a type and structure, as the standard for that. Rocks do not actively move around, but they nonetheless do move around all the time according to external forces such as gravity. What "living" things do is simply sublimate this very same kind of force-activity into the internal structure of the thing itself, so that the impetus of force-moment appears to come from the thing itself rather than from outside of it, when in reality what comes from inside is simply a sublimation of what is outside.

VO shows that everything is connected to its surroundings. Rocks, people, atoms, whatever. Just because people have muscles and nervous systems does not mean that people are somehow fundamentally different in the fact of their valuing than rocks are. Humans just have countlessly more quantity and quality of "reactions" than a rock has, but the rock still has reactions. Strike a rock with a hammer, or watch it fall from a height, and you will see it react.

But in order to fully grasp this you need to look back in evolutionary history and understand the origins of what we call consciousness and "life", as a kind of reflexive system of coordination of inputs and outputs, stimuli and response. The rock encounters stimuli and it responds, whereas the fish does the same thing but for the fish it has far more possible stimuli available to it, and far more possible responses available to it. This is not anthropomorphizing, rather the exact opposite, it is "de-anthropomorphizing life", naturalizing everything, which is what Nietzsche worked on doing, using and trying to expand on Darwin. Nietzsche didn't like how Darwin thought life reduced to struggle for existence, because Nietzsche saw that "existence" is not really something that things struggle for, rather they struggle for "power", or, in the improved language of VO, things struggle for their values. The values of a rock are basically to maintain its integrity wherever and however possible and to integrate outside material into itself wherever and however possible. We all do that too, all living things also do exactly that, but we also do more than just that, too.

Hm yes, maybe it is better to be a bit more demanding. I've really gotten tired and bored of people either pretending not to understand or worse, actually not seeing it.

Zoot has Wittgensteins approach, the young Wittgenstein before his self correction. A will to complete obedience to existing contemporary convention in language, approaching the organically grown, heterogenic and haphazzardly constituted body of verbal language as if it is a mathematical system of logical purity.

Instead Nietzsche and us we distinguish strong and weak terms to prepare for a way of using language that isn't convention-, but function- and merit-based. Power rather than slavery.

Heidegger knew grammar had to be resolved for belief in God to disappear. VO is that resolved grammar.